“In Love”

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Sometime after guitarist Ana da Silva and bassist Gina Birch formed the Raincoats at London’s Hornsey College of Art in 1977, the two musicians—who both sang and were only just learning to play—were listening to a lot of Lou Reed’s Transformer. Birch, then a student of conceptual art, heard a song on the glammy, Bowie-produced album that used a striking amount of echo and was amazed to hear two Lou voices at once. With no immediate access to an echo box herself, she endeavored to apply her own D.I.Y. logic. She just repeated her words over and over—“IN IN IN LOVE LOVE”—giving them a primal edge.

Aching and dizzy and thrilling and alive, 1979’s “In Love” echoes like a feeling you can’t get rid of. Like love itself, its rave-ups fall in and out at unexpected turns. Co-produced in a rudimentary basement studio with Texan rock eccentric Mayo Thompson and Rough Trade founder Geoff Travis, Vicki Aspinall’s violin lines sear like barbed wire, drawing out drama. Da Silva’s minimalist noise guitar scrapes at the skull. The clatter of Palmolive’s gleeful tom-bashing reels it all in close.

“In Love” is The Raincoats’ most direct song, and yet it describes the most indirect feeling ever, one called “lovesick” for a reason that “In Love” proves. It is the sound of infatuation that crawls under your skin and makes you delirious, of butterflies that possess you. Its power is elemental—“I’m so happy/Happy sad,” Birch proclaims, “In love is so tough on my emotions”—capturing the exacerbated pain of uncertainty, the distinct absurdity of love as a concept, the obliterating euphoria of an obsession that becomes an avalanche. The contradictions driving “In Love” are what life is about. If you have a beating heart then you know what “In Love” is, and maybe that’s how it manages to twist you from inside. –Jenn Pelly

“Hot on the Heels of Love”

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By the time the UK experimentalists Throbbing Gristle released 20 Jazz Funk Greats in December 1979, disco—and the inclusive freedoms it represented—was more or less on its last legs. Margaret Thatcher was in power, and Reagan was on the horizon. The dire times called for satire. Throbbing Gristle answered that call.

Their grotesque music—synthetic and industrial and strange—offered a defiantly skewed perspective. “Hot on the Heels of Love,” a snickering homage to Giorgio Moroder and Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love,” should be a joke, but it doubles as an acerbic love letter to ’70s pop and a rough prototype for dance music to come. The gonzo four-to-the-floor beat, the nursery-rhyme keys, and the sweeps of vocoder madness make it strangely bacchanalian. There is charm in its frailties; it is meant to dissolve, unravel before your ears, and disappear.

In some life-affirming way, Throbbing Gristle’s art has always relied upon a radical relationship with standard notions of failure and a satirical understanding of capitalistic success. “Hot on the Heels of Love” is like a guidebook for how to stick a thumb in the eye of normality, its relentless thump offering a profane heartbeat for freaks through the ages, standing up against the oppressive nightmare of picket fences and nuclear families. –Kevin Lozano

“Bela Lugosi’s Dead”

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Aesthetic evolution typically unfolds as gradually as evolution in nature, and it’s usually just as hard to pin down when a genre originated as to decide when dinosaurs became birds. Not so for goth rock, though, whose birth we have down to the second: exactly 170of them into Bauhaus’ debut single, “Bela Lugosi’s Dead,” when Peter Murphy materializes out of a murky fog of dissonant instrumental jamming to declare eternal life as an undead ghoul the new ne plus ultra of cool. He’s freakishly, vampirically convincing enough in this moment to get several successive generations of teenagers, spanning an impressive array of cultures, to join him.

“Bela”’s enduring power is surprising, considering how technically flawed it is. The band recorded it live in one take, and it’s clear that they’d only been playing together for six weeks—the guitar goes out of tune at a few points, and Daniel Ash manages to repeatedly flub a four-note bass line. It’s also nine-and-a-half minutes of messing around with a tape delay trying to make dub reggae sound effects (courtesy of David J, mostly). But that fucked-up, falling-apart quality only makes the song creepier and cooler, and it’s partly why “Bela” is still a dance-floor filler wherever goths flock together. –Miles Raymer

“The Bottle”

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Gil Scott-Heron had one of the most distinctive voices in American music. Better still were his lyrics—cerebral, witty, satirical, caustic, sometimes hilarious, informed by American history and the nuanced black experience within it. Scott-Heron was a poet—he had an MFA in creative writing from Johns Hopkins—but he was also a novelist, and his songs had the feel of indelible short stories. For “The Bottle,” though, he took a nonfiction approach, conducting interviews with alcoholics as background. The song, created with vital collaborator Brian Jackson, was rare for Scott-Heron in that it was danceable, and it was as close as the tandem came to a radio hit, despite the heft of the lyrics. Scott-Heron shows up as a character in the song (“They turn to me/And they ask me Gil/Now don’t you think it’s a crime…”) and then finally, foreshadowing a future that would be bogged down by substance abuse, it ends with his declaration: “Look around on any corner/If you see some brother lookin’ like a goner/It’s gonna be me.” –Michael J. Agovino

“The Look of Love”

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Even before it was given the Isaac Hayes treatment, “The Look of Love” was widely considered a work of greatness. Written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David for Casino Royale and originally sung by Dusty Springfield, the song has been covered dozens of times. But as remarkable as the original was, paired with Hayes’ ambitious, uncompromising ear for arrangements, it morphed into something else entirely. Backed by a full horn section and symphony orchestra, Hayes refurbished Bacharach and David’s pop gem into an 11-minute gospel-tinged soul odyssey. Coming through the singer’s silky baritone, even the lyrics take on a new feel; while Springfield sang with a cool, sultry air, Hayes belts out the song’s longing with raw desperation. –Corey Smith-West

“I Want You”

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Though initially intended as producer and co-writer Leon Ware’s own solo album—and his own Musical Massage makes a perfect companion LP—Marvin Gaye’s I Want You is like few other records in R&B history. At a time when hard-driving disco was the norm, Ware’s lush, elegant instrumentation had a subtle poise that felt out of place. But compared with the aggressive grit of soul stars past, it was far too light, too effervescent to be anything but new.

Where “Let’s Get It On” has an obvious carnality, “I Want You” is a song that suggests a heretofore unexplored intimacy, a vulnerability. This music is naked, and Ware’s delicate instrumentation swirls around as lust tips over the edge of uncertainty. This is the grown-up’s “Let’s Get It On,” a song in which the directness is that much more bold: “Oh, I’ll give you all the love/I want in return, sweet darling,” Gaye purrs over a randy funk beat. “But half the love is all I feel/Ooh, it’s too bad, it’s just too sad.” This is no casual fling: these are adult choices, with a singularly earnest intensity typically heard only in private. –David Drake

“Strawberry Letter 23”

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Brothers Johnson were a duo of actual brothers who backed Quincy Jones on a number of his ’70s recordings before stepping out on their own. Their biggest hit, oddly, was thanks to 18-year-old singer/songwriter Shuggie Otis, whose hippie-dippie acid trip of a folk song, “Strawberry Letter 23,” they turned into a serious barn burner. It was a bold decision that paid off. “Pretty music I hear/So happy and loud/Blue flowers echo from a cherry cloud,” go the lyrics, certainly the most childlike and shamanistic words ever paired with a bassline as funky as this one. Supposedly an ode to a paramour and her strawberry-scented love letters, the song’s deeper meaning has always been a mystery and is also beside the point. Its poetry is, above all, a vehicle for bass so big you can take a bite out of it, subtle vocal oohing, keys that define “twinkling.” There’s what you could call a guitar solo in the latter third, but really, it’s more of a dainty impression of a rocket launch. The song soared so high, it still hasn’t landed. –Matthew Schnipper

“Satta Massagana”

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“Satta Massagana” is central to the sound of Jamaica in the 1970s. Though not a hit upon its release, it has since become a common Rastafari chant that expounds that belief’s culture, as well as a classic reggae anthem. The title of the song is an approximation of the Ethiopian language of Amharic, a very loose transliteration of, roughly, “Give thanks to God.” More than the title that references Ethiopia; allusion to Haile Selassie and Biblical prophecy unspool throughout as the Abyssinians—a trio of Rastafari singers—provide an outline of their beliefs in a chant: “There is a land far far away/Where there's no night, there's only day/Look into the book of life and you will see.”

The groove of “Satta Massagana” spurred on many reggae acts in Jamaica, and continues to still. Demonstrating the enduring power of its rhythm, the instrumental was also remade in 1997, giving the telltale horns of the instrumental new life. –Erin Macleod

“O-o-h Child”

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As far back as 1966, before the Jackson 5 had even left Indiana, Chicago’s musical family the Five Stairsteps had scored sizable R&B hits under the direction of patriarch Clarence Burke, the group’s original bassist/co-writer/manager and also a detective for the Chicago Police Department. Though they upped their cuteness factor in the early days by adding three-year-old sibling Cubie, their breakthrough moment remained elusive until 1970, when DJs flipped their cover of the Beatles’ “Dear Prudence” in favor of a song that became R&B’s answer to “Over the Rainbow.”

Written and produced by Stan Vincent, a Buddah Records staffer who’d previously scored with Connie Francis and Lou Christie, “O-o-h Child” achieves its extraordinary uplifting effect by starting with the chorus and adding multiple key changes to create a funky, sunshine gospel song about hope. Alohe Burke’s sultry alto anchors the song, and though the childlike voices of brothers Clarence Jr., James, Denis, and Keni are individually unremarkable, together they are utterly disarming, and they all come together for one of pop’s most affecting climaxes. It’s as if the dreams and gains of the civil rights movement got condensed into three minutes of radiant joy. –Barry Walters

“Miss You”

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“Miss You” was a saving grace for the Rolling Stones. It was the band’s first No. 1 single in nearly five years, and it opened Some Girls, an album critics immediately hailed as their best since 1972’sExile on Main St. It was also the final chart-topper of the Stones’ career, and “Miss You” certainly sounds like the kind of energized song that’s made by a band in need of a grand statement. The Stones are notorious for shaping genres to their own ends (the B-side of “Miss You,” for instance, was the exaggerated, near-parody country ballad “Far Away Eyes”), and here they looked to disco to breathe life into their sound. Jagger, never one not to sex things up, sings of Puerto Rican women who are just dyyyiiin’ to meet him, alternating whispers, falsetto coos, and howls throughout. The 4/4 beat is made even more robust by the backing saxophone and harmonica, riding a guitar line so sumptuous that anything Mick Jagger uttered would sound like lust incarnate. –Matthew Strauss

“Mr. Blue Sky”

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ELO mastermind Jeff Lynne has always been a shameless Beatles disciple, a fact made evident in the piano pounding that opens his band’s biggest hit: It sounds a bit like how McCartney begins his half of “A Day in the Life.” A songwriter with less of a mad-scientist streak would not have been able to pair such obvious inspiration with a topic as mundane as the weather and arrive at a song this singular in its funk, but meticulous studio rat Lynne packed “Mr. Blue Sky” full of signature touches: a cello and piano crescendo, choral chants, oodles of cowbell, Gibb Brothers falsetto harmonizing, a dreamy Harrisonian solo, and one of the decade’s best uses of vocoder.

Electric Light Orchestra was, first and foremost, a band built around the notion that classical and pop were not enemies but, instead, partners in quest of completely over-the-top musical drama. Others had embraced this idea from time to time—George Martin with the Beatles, Brian Wilson on Pet Sounds—but ELO really committed to the symphonic concept without sacrificing hooks, as proggier bands did. So that “Mr. Blue Sky” served as the finale to Lynne’s ambitious “Concerto for a Rainy Day” suite at the heart of ELO’s 1977 double album, Out of the Blue, was not surprising in the slightest. What is surprising is that, nearly 40 years later, “Mr. Blue Sky” remains ago-to sync in TV shows and movies, a shorthand for waking up and tackling that big, beautiful world head on. –Jillian Mapes

“Funky Kingston”

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Toots & the Maytals’ breakthrough album, Funky Kingston, has a broader geography than the title suggests. It joyously pairs the ska, reggae, and rocksteady of the band’s native Jamaica with American soul, from its brassy, frolicking cover of “Louie Louie” to singer Toots Hibberts’ magnetic, Otis Redding-worthy rasp. The title track stands apart as a moment of singular bliss—a leisurely jam of sax, electric guitar, and openhearted harmonies, topped by Hibberts’ keen love for his homeland. “Funky Kingston is what I’ve got for you!” he hollers, sounding improbably relaxed despite winding steadily to gospel levels of reverence. “Went from east to west, yeah/I just play from north to south, yeah!” It’s the rare song that delivers on its promises—the track truly grows funkier, more irrepressible with each of Hibberts’ approximately 500 hoots of its funkiness.

Toots & the Maytals never reached the crossover global fame of Bob Marley and the Wailers, despite earning many formidable fans—the Who invited them to open an American tour, but reception was frosty. Still, the group shaped Jamaican music in their effortless merging of the island’s most beloved musical forms. And if the rest of the world could not fully dive into their sound, they still met the band at their finest hour, in “Funky Kingston.” –Stacey Anderson

“Chameleon”

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In the early ’70s, Herbie Hancock, a practicing Nichiren Buddhist, had a vision while chanting his mantra, Nam-myoho-renge-kyo. He saw himself—the hard bop piano legend—playing straight-ahead funk in Sly Stone’s band. It was in that spiritual moment when his jazz transformed. Hancock wrote in the liner notes of the reissue of Head Hunters, “I was tired of playing something heavy. I wanted to play something light....Would I like to have a funky band that played the kind of music Sly or someone like that was playing? My response was, ‘Actually, yes.’”

Out of this holy revelation “Chameleon” was born, over 15 minutes of funk and fusion that would introduce jazz into arenas. The four-decade run of “Chameleon” is due not only to Hancock’s vision of the interconnectedness of black American music, but his Head Hunters band’s funk exactitude: Bennie Maupin’s choppy sax riff clicks against Harvey Mason’s well-pocketed drums, and it all marches around Paul Jackson’s iconic six-note bass line, so sticky it would gum up any other engine but this. Mason’s switch to the ride cymbal around the six-minute mark sounds like the sun exploding all over Hancock’s ARP Odyssey synth solo. The song is a rhythmic knot, deceptively complex but savagely cool. Hancock’s pivot to funk and fusion helped amplify traditional jazz in the mainstream, and “Chameleon” was the first song you could feel right in your ribs. –Jeremy Larson

“Love Hangover”

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For just over two-and-a-half minutes, Diana Ross smolders over one of the most sumptuous, loping bassline and velvety string combos that Motown could pull together in the label's post-Norman Whitfield years. “Love Hangover” is a gauzy, low-gravity glide. It has all the buoyancy of floating in water, and Ross's awestruck voice nails the metaphor of being so sprung on someone that even the day after is worth the disorientation. (She also drops maybe the most nonchalantly blissful “hey” to ever hit No.1.)

“Love Hangover” is one of pop’s best portrayals of falling for a person so amazing that it actually hurts. And then, as if all those points have been succinctly and appropriately made, someone flips a switch and every light in this hit single goes out except a strobe. Its extended disco metamorphosis, which accounts for more than five of the song's nearly eight-minute length, turns out to be the hair of the dog—the groove grows even more sinuous while a glimmering electric piano riffs off itself and becomes the rhythm’s secret weapon. Through it all, Ross vamps off the lyrics with a reeling euphoria that transcends her words. –Nate Patrin

“Love Is the Drug”

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One of the many loveable aspects about glam’s most versatile band is that no matter how far out Roxy Music ventured on an art-rock limb, crooning about European decadence and inflatable darlings, they always came back to fantastic dance songs. After several such UK smashes, they scored their first and only U.S. Top 40 hit in early 1976 with Bryan Ferry’s most iconic lyric set to Roxy Music’s most propulsive and streamlined playing—check how John Gustafson’s bassline pumps and jumps. So undeniable that even prog-rock radio went for it despite its disco beat and attitude, “Love Is the Drug” picks up on David Bowie’s plastic soul phase and drives it straight to the singles’ bar.

Starting with the sound of shoes on pavement, the closing of a car door, the starting of an engine, and the skidding of wheels, the track clinches Ferry’s presentation of the rock troubadour as performance artist. He’s too much of a romantic to write about what was yet to be called sex addiction, and he’s too self-aware to fully lose himself in physicality the way his inspirations might. Instead, this is multi-sensual seduction; toe-to-toe, heart-to-heart foreplay that celebrates the thrill of the ritual, the passion of pursuit. And when it winds its way up to the money shot, it’s still discreet: “Dim the lights, you can guess the rest,” he sighs, followed by a swank rat-a-tat by the band’s supremely driving drummer, Paul Thompson, that functions as a wink. Even their funk is gentlemanly. –Barry Walters

“Summer Madness”

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For four decades, “Summer Madness” has provided fertile ground for hip-hop producers. It’s eight minutes of breezy instrumental synth-soul has been stretched, chopped, and looped countless times. And its iconic rising synth glide has been repurposed so frequently it’s practically canon in certain genres. The song comes from Kool and the Gang's 1974 album Light of Words, which saw the band drawing heavily from their jazz roots, using more complex song structures, and experimenting with analog synths. Issued as a single and supported by a performance on “Soul Train,” “Summer Madness” climbed to No. 35 on the pop charts, and set the tone for funk jazz fusion for decades to follow.

Today, the idea that a fusion instrumental pulled together during a 5 a.m. recording session could have a formidable run on the pop charts seems farfetched. But despite the shifting musical landscape “Summer Madness” has remained relevant—in the hands of generations of producers it’s been continuously amended to suit the times, aging gracefully along the way. –Corey Smith-West

“Jealous Guy”

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In 1968, the Beatles embarked on a trip that can be heard all over The White Album, traveling to India to study Transcendental Meditation with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Apparently Lennon and McCartney were moved in similar ways: Paul wrote “Mother Nature’s Son” while John came up with “Child of Nature.” The latter was shelved, but Lennon knew he had something special in terms of melody, even if the lyrics didn’t click. As he embarked on a solo career, he turned the tune into a piano ballad that plumbed the depths of masculine insecurity in a way rarely seen from rock icons. Towards the end of the Beatles, Lennon seemed to sneer at McCartney’s sentimentality; for him to write a song as tender as “Jealous Guy,” it had to be emotionally raw and real. Musically, the Imagine standout begins a bit heavy-handed on the schmaltz, but with Lennon laid bare, he starts to loosen up as the percussion and strings behind him grow.

Lennon may have been “dreaming of the past” in more ways than one with “Jealous Guy.” “I didn’t mean to hurt you” is an unsettling line to hear in light of what we know about Lennon now, specifically the domestic abuse he admitted to in aPlayboy interview shortly before his 1980 murder: “I used to be cruel to my woman, and physically—any woman. I was a hitter. I couldn't express myself and I hit.” Though recorded a decade earlier, “Jealous Guy” bleeds with remorse, as Lennon turns his own pain and shame it into something a listener could use. –Jillian Mapes

“Killing Me Softly With His Song”

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These days, we think of the Fugees’ 1996 cover as having introduced a new generation to Roberta Flack’s Grammy-winning 1973 single “Killing Me Softly With His Song,” but Flack wasn’t the first artist to cut it. She heard folk singer Lori Lieberman’s 1972 version on TWA’s in-flight music service and knew she had to do her own version. “But I’d never heard of Lori Lieberman, so I thought I’d see what she’d got going for her that I didn’t have,”Flack told NME shortly after her version became a hit. “Before I heard the song, I thought it had an awfully good title, and when I heard it I really loved it.”

Lieberman’s infatuation with Don McLean may have influenced Norman Gimbel’s lyrics (really), but it’s easy to see why Flack was the one who took “Killing Me Softly” to No. 1. This is a song about witnessing a performance that resonates so deeply, the singer might as well be using your soul as an instrument. The experience isn’t a totally emotional one, though; phrases like “strumming my pain with his fingers” and “I felt all flushed with fever” pulse with physicality, and Lieberman’s dreamy voice and acoustic guitar couldn’t do justice to that side of the song. It took Flack’s warm, searching alto, Ron Carter’s teasing bass, and Grady Tate’s throbbing drums to heat up the track without trampling its innocence. –Judy Berman

“Surf’s Up”

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When the sessions for Smile crumbled into a lysergic haze by May 1967, those hallowed songs from Brian Wilson’s “teenage symphony to God” were scattered to the winds, with only fragments to be gleaned from the group’s subsequent albums. Most maddening was “Surf’s Up,” which television audiences had seen Wilson perform in 1966 before the song vanished. Until the codex was reassembled by Wilson in 2004, the closest fans could get to the true majesty and mystique of Smile was when “Surf’s Up” finally surfaced in 1971, as the title track of the band’s 17th studio album.

“Surf’s Up” bade farewell to the Beach Boys’ outdated surf-boy personas, right there in the title; it was complex, impressionistic, and the crowning achievement of Wilson and lyricist Van Dyke Parks’ collaboration. The lyrics alight on Tennyson, Maupassant, and children’s songs;the coda of "The child is the father of the man," easily the most effervescent chorus the Boys ever harmonized on, is also a stunning quote of a William Wordsworth poem. –Andy Beta

“Hallogallo”

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Some bands are lucky enough to emerge fully formed, with a distinct style and sound already in place. Neu! arrived with something more powerful: a template. You wonder how quickly Michael Rother and Klaus Dinger realized the persistent “motorik” pattern Dinger beat out wasn't just an element of a song but an album, a band—perhaps krautrock itself. “Hallogallo,” the first song on their first album, was the finest-ever application of this form. It’s exceptionally easy to listen to: The clucking, muted guitar plucks trigger an ASMR-like sensation, so gently do they dot the song’s rhythm. “Hallogallo” is like watching an entire stadium of people exit in the most orderly fashion imaginable: It’s going to take a while, and it’s going to be fine. Rother and Dinger would go on to make this song many more times, maybe too many: They were expertly lampooned/saluted just a year later by Faust. Listening to “Hallogallo” is a good reminder of just how hard it was, for Neu! and everyone else, not to keep making it. –Andrew Gaerig